Facebook Bans 20,000 Kids a Day

autospa writes "Although Facebook requires all users to be 13 or older, the social network bans 20,000 underage users a day, a spokeswoman said. 'There are people who lie. There are people who are under 13 [accessing Facebook],' Mozelle Thompson, Facebook's chief privacy adviser, told the The Telegraph."

Comments

Re:I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked moderating dating/chat websites for a while, and we had to deal with quite a few underage users. There are a few methods for bringing the data to the moderators attention (Bayesian filtering, user reporting, even identifying likely cases by their friends within the site), but they come down to one factor:

People generally only bother to lie about their age in the age field. In their 'about me', in their username, in their pictures, in every single chat conversation or status update they'll be entirely honest under the assumption that the site only checks the Date Of Birth field. After a user/profile has been flagged as likely for whatever reason, it's generally a matter of seconds to verify whether or not that's the case.

Hardly stupid

[Adayse]

I've been thinking that Facebook accounts for my kids, 5 and 7, might encourage them to learn to read and write.